Charles F. Luce, Jr. on Legal Ethics: The 5 Most Dangerous Rules of Professional Conduct

Thursday, November 29, 2012

The 5 Most Dangerous Rules of Professional Conduct

For Colorado lawyers needing ethics credits before year-end, on 18 December I will be teaching a CLE for NBI entitled The 5 Most Dangerous Rules of Professional Conduct. It's a concept and program I have been thinking about for a few years.

For those not needing credit or unable to attend you can read the details and order the program here. I'll also be blogging some of the ideas from this program into the blog in the coming months.

To all, survive the holidays!

Welcome

I first became interested in the practical application of legal ethics in law school. As an alternative to a written final exam, my friend, John Gray, and I collaborated on a project to demonstrate our comprehension of the then-intricate rules of attorney advertising by writing and producing unethical legal radio advertisements which systematically violated each and every rule.

Later, John Carver and the University of Denver College of Law gave me the opportunity to teach Legal Professional as a Lecturer in Law at DU.

About the same time, I joined the Colorado Bar Association's Legal Ethics Committee, one of the finest groups of professionals with whom I have ever been associated. I have been a member continuously since 1986, and have served longer as the in-house ethics adviser for our firm.

In the course of teaching ethics, representing attorneys and law firms as a counselor and advocate, serving as an expert witness, Ethics Committee work, and analyzing our firm's own day-to-day ethics and legal practice issues, I have amassed a fair amount of research on legal ethics and issues related to the practice of law. I have accumulated an even greater number of opinions regarding these subjects.

In 1997 I built the first website devoted to Colorado legal ethics. That website still exists, but I decided I a blog would be easier to to maintain than continuing to code in raw HTML.

Here you will find various short pieces on legal ethics and the practice of law, some with links to long articles I have written. The rules, policies and practices relating to legal ethics and the practice of law are dynamic, so I periodically update, revise and add materials to this site. Please check back from time to time to see what is new.

Thank you for visiting.